Not 100% clear that she was reacting to his dedication, for all we know she was an ex- of his.

Anyway, I saw the Chambers Brothers several times at the Fillmore East, including a New Year's Eve. They were very good and they were very positive people in a groovy Christian kind of way. Nothing angry about them at all. I'm sorry to see this happen to him.

THE Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.

Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details.

The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored.

Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.

But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination.

Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.

Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.

This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted.

What is reasonable to do, especially in the dark of night, is defined by preconceived social roles that paint young black men as potential criminals and predators. Black men, the narrative dictates, are dangerous, to be watched and put down at the first false move. This pain is one all black men know; putting away the tie you wear to the office means peeling off the assumption that you are owed equal respect. Mr. Martin’s hoodie struck the deepest chord because we know that daring to wear jeans and a hooded sweatshirt too often means that the police or other citizens are judged to be reasonable in fearing you.

We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative.

Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach.

There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight.

Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again.

What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him.

I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.

Ekow N. Yankah is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

THE Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.

**B.S. Zimmerman never should have been charged. There was a reason this case was never presented to a grand jury. The prosecution had no case and they knew it. Race had nothing to do with that. It was the racial industrial complex that pushed this into the courts.**

Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details.

The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored.

Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.

**Were casually dressed white teenagers the descriptions given of the suspects of the burglaries in Zimmerman's neighborhood?**

But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination.

**And why is that? Is the black crime problem just a racist fever dream?**

Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.

**If a 17 year old white thug was smashing a black man's head into the concrete, and reasonably fearing serious bodily injury or death, the black man drew a lawfully concealed handgun and shot and killed the white thug, then the law is the same. And that scenario shouldn't go to trial either.**

Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.

This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted.

What is reasonable to do, especially in the dark of night, is defined by preconceived social roles that paint young black men as potential criminals and predators. Black men, the narrative dictates, are dangerous, to be watched and put down at the first false move. This pain is one all black men know; putting away the tie you wear to the office means peeling off the assumption that you are owed equal respect. Mr. Martin’s hoodie struck the deepest chord because we know that daring to wear jeans and a hooded sweatshirt too often means that the police or other citizens are judged to be reasonable in fearing you.

We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative.

Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach.

There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight.

Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again.

What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him.

I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.

Ekow N. Yankah is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

**A law professor should aquaint himself with the legal topic at hand before beclowning himself, then again, he probably specializes in litigating for the racial industrial compex.**

Blood stains and a make shift memorial for 18-year-old Jamal Jones is seen where police found him with gunshots wounds to the shoulder and chest over the past weekend, on Chicago's Southside, Monday, June 17, 2013 (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

(CNSNews.com) – In the 20-day period of the George Zimmerman trial, four minors – three teens and a five-year-old boy - were gunned down in Chicago, according to Homicide Watch Chicago, a Chicago Sun-Times publication, which details every murder that takes place in the city.

On June 28, five-year-old Sterling Sims was killed in a double murder that also claimed the life of his mother, 31-year-old Chavonne Brown. Both were shot in their apartment, and police believe the motive was robbery.

On July 1, 16-year-old Antonio Fenner was gunned down on the sidewalk next to the body of a 32-year-old man who had gang ties. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been named. Fenner’s mother believes her son was in the wrong place at the wrong time, because no one in her family knew the other victim or what Fenner’s association was to him.

On July 3, 14-year-old Damani Henard was murdered outside a high school. His body was found next a bicycle.

On July 9, 15-year-old Ed Cooper was shot and killed while spending time with friends at the park. A gunman got out of a black van and began firing as the boys ran away. Cooper was shot in the street and continued running to a vacant lot where he died.

Zimmerman was charged with killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Fla., who was walking through a gated community on his way home from the convenience store. Zimmerman argued that he acted in self-defense.

I told you this 3 weeks ago, but Drudge flashes it today: Rachel Jeantel says she warned Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman could be a gay rapist.

Drudge has the transcript of last night's Piers Morgan interview on CNN:

MORGAN: You felt that there was no doubt in your mind from what Trayvon was telling you on the phone about the creepy ass cracka and so on, that he absolutely believed that George Zimmerman, this man, you didn't know who he was at the time, but this man, was pursuing him?

JEANTEL: Yes.

MORGAN: And he was freaked out by it?

JEANTEL: Yes. Definitely after I say may be a rapist, for every boy, for every man, every -- who's not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creep out?... And people need to understand, he didn't want that creepy ass cracker going to his father or girlfriend's house to go get -- mind you, his little brother was there. You know -- now, mind you, I told you -- I told Trayvon it might have been a rapist." Here's my post from June 27th, with embedded video from Jeantel's testimony. I said (boldface added):

You assume that there's no way he'd say "cracker" if he didn't see him as white? But he didn't say "cracker." He said "creepy ass cracker." I understand the use of "ass" as an intensifier connected to the adjective "creepy." Creepy-ass cracker, as in very creepy cracker.

But "ass" could go with "cracker" — "ass-cracker." The conversation continued, according to Jeantel: "So... he told me the man was looking at him, so I had to think it might have been a rapist." Why rapist? A man raping a man? How common is that as a fear? But it was the first thing Jeantel thought to say after he said creepy-ass cracker/creepy ass-cracker. The term "ass cracker" could easily mean a man who rapes a man, especially one who goes after a teenaged boy....

The word "creepy" makes special sense if you reinterpret the "ass" to go with "cracker." Martin said a man was following him, looking at him. He might have thought Zimmerman was a man out looking for sex and was watching him for that reason. What conversations had Martin had in the past with Jeantel about worries of this kind. She "had to think it might have been a rapist."...

Why didn't Martin take Jeantel's advice and run home? The rapist/ass-cracker theory makes sense of Martin's decision to go after Zimmerman. If he saw Zimmerman as a sexual predator, he might think confrontation was a good idea or even an important step: These creeps in the neighborhood need to know that I'm not their prey. It's not enough to run inside daddy's house. My manhood must be established here and now or I can't walk free around here anymore.Call out the gay rights activists. In this interpretation, it was a gay-bashing!

ADDED: Thanks to Irene for nudging me to post this. It was right there in the testimony, and the defense lawyers — who were pretty astute about hearing cues and following up — missed this.

"Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter."

Scott is charged with manslaughter in the April 4 shooting across the street from his home on Baneberry Way in Greece.

Scott told the court he confronted Cervini and other person as they broke into a neighbor's car. The other person ran away, but Scott said Cervini ran at him.

Scott already had his gun drawn. He said he told Cervini to stop, but the teen kept coming, so he shot him twice.

"I thought he did very well on the stand. I don't think the cross examination touched him one bit. I think he was very consistent and had been consistent from the beginning...that the only reason he shot his gun is because Chris Cervini was charging at him," said Scott’s lawyer, John Parrinello.

“I don't know how you can not see that, especially when you're in fear for your life. You're going to notice every movement, how they're positioned, how they're coming at you...how you feel threatened. He can't point to anything conclusively as to how this person was a threat other than running down the driveway," said Julie Finocchio, prosecutor.

The prosecution claims Cervini was actually shot from behind.

Lawyers will make their closing arguments in the case Wednesday. Jury deliberation is set to begin Thursday.

Closer Look at Tuesday's Testimony

When Roderick Scott took the stand in his own defense Tuesday, he told the jury that neighbors alerted him before April 4 that break-ins had been occurring in the neighborhood.

He also spoke about his work history, which includes Johnson & Johnson, and Kodak, which sold his division to J&J.

Scott said on April 4, he was sleeping on the couch, because he and his girlfriend had a disagreement. In the early morning he awoke and heard voices. He looked out the front door to see what was going on outside.

He testified he saw three individuals who were in his driveway, saw them walk out and cross the street, then walk up to a neighbor's vehicle, pulling on the latch and handles of the neighbor's truck. He then went upstairs, told his girlfriend Tracy that someone was breaking into a vehicle, and told her to call 911. He grabbed his pistol, for which he has a permit, "to protect myself" then went outside.

Scott said his intent was "to stop or detain the criminals," not to shoot anyone. He walked down the driveway and over to 39 Baneberry Way. He saw one person standing on a sidewalk, and some rummaging going on inside a vehicle, which had the dome light on.

At that point, Scott testified he pulled his handgun out of the holster, and chambered a round. "I wanted to protect myself and I intended to," Scott said.

He walked toward the individual, who started to walk away toward Manitou Road. He did not tell that individual to stop. It's believed that individual was Brian Hopkins.

At this point, Scott was a foot or so off the sidewalk, and he saw someone rustling around inside the vehicle at 39 Baneberry. He testified he clearly saw two individuals. He drew his pistol and assumed the a shooter's stance. "I didn't know what I was up against, or if they were armed," Scott said.

He told the individuals to stop, that his girlfriend had called 911, and that he had a gun. The individuals stopped, and a few seconds passed. Scott says the teens were talking, then one of them ran around the front of the truck. The other ran down the driveway toward him, screaming. Scott warned him he had a gun, then shot him.

He assumed the boy may have been armed.

"I felt if he got to me he would try to kill me or hurt me," Scott testified.

After the shooting, Scott said Cervini, who was running at him, kept running, passed by him, and fell face-first onto the ground.

Scott went back into the house, had his girlfriend call 911 and spoke to the 911 operator.

The police took him to the station on Island Cottage Road, where he was held for hours, before being transported to jail. Neither the two 911 calls Scott made, nor the videotaped statements he made to police, were played in court.

Scott testified that he never refused to talk to the police, and that everything he told the police was no different than what he testified to in court.

When prosecutor Julie Finocchio cross-examined Scott, she began by discussing Scott's apparent expertise with guns, and his frequent visits to a gun club for target practice. Finocchio also brought up Roderick Scott's involvement in three different styles of martial arts, and his participation in competitions.

Then Finocchio asked Scott, after he grabbed his gun and went outside, and he didn't go back indoors, "You didn't just go back inside and wait for the police?"

"No," said Scott.

"You decided you were going to handle the situation," said Finocchio.

"No," replied Scott. He told Finocchio he was going to go across the street to tell his neighbor someone was trying to break into the truck. On the way there, Scott said he saw something - a person walking on the sidewalk. Scott pulled the gun out of its holster and chambered a round.

Prosecutor Finocchio handed Scott the gun in court, and told Scott to chamber it, which he did, in just a second.

Defense Attorney John Parrinello said that the prosecutor kept interrupting Scott's answers, and he asked for a mistrial three times in a row during this testimony, which was denied each time.

Scott told Finocchio he could not recall how the person who was coming at him was positioned – whether he was facing him or not.

Finocchio then played a portion of a videotaped statement that Scott made to police, in which he said the person who ran at him was facing him directly all along. Finocchio suggested discrepancies in what Scott told investigators versus what he told the court.

"Having seen no weapon and guessing maybe he has one, you decide to shoot," said Finocchio.

"Correct," said Scott, calmly.

Before Scott testified Tuesday, Parrinello asked the judge to strike the testimony of James Cervini, saying it is riddled with inconsistencies.

Referring to his client, Parrinello said, "This arrest was a rush to judgement."

But Judge David Egan denied the motion. James Cervini is Chris Cervini's cousin.

Parrinello also asked for an order of dismissal, saying there is no proof that Scott intended to hurt Cervini. "There's no doubt, Christopher Cervini died by his own hand, his own conduct," said Parrinello.

That motion was also denied.

The day's first defense witness was Kenneth Tisdale, a friend and co-worker of Scott's, who also lives in Greece. Tisdale testified that on April 2, he and Scott played basketball at a park in Greece, and that Scott was banged up during the game, and was limping the next day at work.

Tisdale's prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute was brought up by the prosecution.

Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.

"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."

As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out.

"I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."

Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner.

"The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."

Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.

Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott.

"How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."

Scott says the last seven months have been difficult for him and his family. If he could go back to the events in the early morning hours of April 4, there are things he says he would do differently.

"If it meant a person not losing their life, absolutely,” he said. “Would I still have tried to stop what was going on? That I would have done. But if I knew ahead of time that I could do something to help somebody from losing their life, I don't want anyone to lose their life."

Scott says the first thing he was going to do was go home and get a good night sleep. When asked if he'll continue living in his current home, which is just one street away from the Cervini's, he said “for the time being.”

LOS ANGELES — The police here were preparing for another night of protests on Tuesday, and community activists were working to maintain the peace after anger over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin turned violent in South Los Angeles on Monday night.

A group of about 150 mostly young people broke away from a peaceful demonstration on Monday in the Crenshaw district, long home to many of the city’s black residents. Protesters ran through the streets, blocking traffic, hitting cars, assaulting pedestrians and ransacking businesses, the police reported.

Hundreds of police officers in riot gear descended on the area to quell the unrest. Fourteen people were arrested, the police said, half of them juveniles.

Two decades after the acquittal of white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King sparked deadly riots in the same part of the city, residents and public officials agreed that the more muted anger over the Zimmerman verdict — and the much smaller outbreak of violence — showed how much, and how little, has changed.

“Twenty-one years ago we witnessed what could happen when there’s a reaction to a verdict,” Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor who represents South Los Angeles, said at a news conference on Monday night. “Similar sentiments are being expressed here in this space, but the response of the L.A.P.D. is qualitatively different.”

Many in the neighborhood, while remaining wary of law enforcement officials, agreed that relations between black residents and the Police Department had vastly improved. The police allowed the demonstration to continue until the violence began.

“The police did a top-notch job,” said Trebien Bellows, 46, a lifelong neighborhood resident. “Before things got crazy, they jumped right on it.”

Despite his praise for the police, Mr. Bellows said he understood the frustration expressed by the group that broke away from the protest in outrage. Young black people continue to be perceived as threats and targeted by the police, he said, and the Zimmerman case showed how they often paid with their lives.

“What happened after the peaceful protest was basically just kids lashing out,” he said. “Young African-American and Latino kids, they’re the ones being targeted.”

Darnell M. Hunt, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studied the 1992 riots, said that five years after the election of the country’s first black president, race relations are at a critical point.

When Barack Obama was elected, he said, crowds gathered in Leimert Park to celebrate. “They really did see it as a new day in terms of race, and most importantly for black youth, who for generations never seriously thought they could become president,” Dr. Hunt said.

Now, the same community is protesting instead of celebrating. “People were hoping their view of justice would be served, and it wasn’t,” Dr. Hunt said. “They’re having a hard time believing in the American dream and the idea that African-Americans had finally become full-fledged citizens.”

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a speech Tuesday at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Orlando, Fla., condemned Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” he said.

The unrest in Los Angeles followed consecutive nights of largely peaceful protests in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington. In Oakland, Calif., demonstrators blocked traffic along Interstate 880 for a brief period during the afternoon rush Monday before authorities cleared the road.

The protesters made varied demands. Some wanted the federal government to prosecute Mr. Zimmerman. Others hoped for an overhaul of the entire American justice system.

“This is much bigger than just this one trial,” said Oriana Sly, 20, of Los Angeles. She carried a sign that read “Justice for Trayvon” as she marched up Crenshaw Boulevard here on Sunday night. “People of color have not received our fair share with the American justice system.”

On Monday night, however, some protesters’ frustration boiled over. They stormed a Walmart and other stores. They ran through the streets, blocking traffic and jumping on stopped cars, kicking them and dancing on the hoods. A television news crew was attacked.

As the city’s new mayor, Eric Garcetti, called for calm on the streets on Tuesday, he acknowledged the echoes from the Rodney King riots, but insisted the city had come a long way.

“This is a different moment in time; we can see how much change for the better the city has enjoyed since 1992,” Mr. Garcetti said. “For somebody born after 1992, they just see the world the way it is before them. I think the importance of seeing this through the youth’s eyes is to see what’s left undone.”

“Our work isn’t finished here,” he added. “It wasn’t finished in 1965. It wasn’t finished in 1992. It is not finished in 2013.”

Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.

"I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it's still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over."

As deliberations dragged on over two days and the jury asked for testimony to be read back, Scott admits he didn't know how it would all turn out.

"I was nervous of course,” he said. “You never know what direction this whole thing is going to turn, so I have no idea. But it worked out and I feel that justice (was) served today."

Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner.

"The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."

Scott says he acted in self defense when he confronted Cervini and two others saying they were stealing from neighbors cars. He told them he had a gun and ordered them to freeze and wait for police.

Scott says he shot Cervini twice when the victim charged toward him yelling he was going to get Scott.

"How can this happen to a beautiful, sweet child like that?” asked Cervini’s aunt Carol Cervini. “All he wanted to do was go home. And then for them to say, he was saying, 'Please don't kill me. I'm just a kid,' and he just kept on shooting him."

Scott says the last seven months have been difficult for him and his family. If he could go back to the events in the early morning hours of April 4, there are things he says he would do differently.

"If it meant a person not losing their life, absolutely,” he said. “Would I still have tried to stop what was going on? That I would have done. But if I knew ahead of time that I could do something to help somebody from losing their life, I don't want anyone to lose their life."

Scott says the first thing he was going to do was go home and get a good night sleep. When asked if he'll continue living in his current home, which is just one street away from the Cervini's, he said “for the time being.”

He is making a point, but the point isn't the one stated. Of course there is black on black crime. 94% of crime on blacks is black on black, his own stat, and there is WAY too much crime on blacks. I think the point he is making is that America is not as racial as we may think it is and the crime is not racial. Conservatives I think are pointing out the same thing, that this crime is not born out of racial difference. People don't steal a bike or wallet from someone because of the victim's race. They steal because they want what the other person has, don't care about right from wrong. They see the opportunity and give it a shot. Murder is more personal, hence the familiarity. Drug, gang and turf wars and love gone bad probably explain most of it. Random shootings are the exception.

Back to the article: "it’s hard to disentangle this from the stew of hyper-segregation (often a result of deliberate policies), entrenched poverty, and nonexistent economic opportunities that characterizes a substantial number of black communities. Hence the countless inner-city anti-violence groups that focus on creating opportunity for young, disadvantaged African-Americans, through education, mentoring, and community programs."

FYI to the 'mentors': One thing has lifted more people out of poverty more than all other forces combined in the history of human civilization, economic freedom. These mentors and program designers ought to give that a shot in the predominantly black portions of America's inner cities to which this author refers. Whites living in that culture have the same problems; it's not racial. Our current policy and message is the exact opposite, teach people to demand and take more. See the Obama re-election for example, selling 'welfare rights' to welfare recipients, along with the scare message that the opponents want to 'take' these great programs away from you.

Having spent about twenty years in dozens of countries, I have some idea about how we are viewed abroad. When it comes to race, many people look at America as black and white. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. We are a bunch of mixed breeds.

One of my siblings recently got a genetic test. We are all over the map, including a trace from Sub-Saharan Africa. Apparently I have black grandmother or grandfather in my tree. Mostly it turns out we apparently are Northern European, but still we are mutts. My incredible wife is darker than many so called African Americans.

Insofar as "white" culture in America, there is no definite white culture that most whites belong to. Many whites are with some form or another of black, Asian, or Hispanic culture, and the inverse is true. Keeping in mind there is no "Asian" culture any more than there is a "white" or "black" or "Hispanic" or "European" or "Thai." We truly are mixed up with each other, which is one of our primary strengths.

Do you know how many cultures there are in Thailand? There are so many that I do not even have an idea. There must be a hundred, and even more if we count fusions. Just as Europeans -- I spent about six years in Europe -- often think America is black and white, we project the same onto other countries.

There must literally be thousands of "Indian" cultures. The varieties are tantamount endless. It would take most people a year just to memorize the names of the languages, dialects, and peoples of India. Indian banknotes are inscribed with about 15 major languages.

There are many "white" cultures in America. I do not know how many. I have traveled extensively to 48 states and it became confusing. A white man from the mountains of Western North Carolina has a completely different culture than a white man from Manhattan. On language, the man from the mountains will understand the dialect of the man from Manhattan, but the Manhattan man might not understand a word the mountain man says. A Russian immigrant will have a dramatically different culture than an Austrian immigrant. All will be lumped as “white.”

I relate with "black" culture in my hometown much closer than with some of the "white" cultures I encountered in the USA. I have far more in common with black kids I started first grade with than with a white man from Budapest.

I understand blacks on a cultural level in my hometown because we grew up together seven days per week for years on end, but some of the "white" American cultures I have encountered were foreign to me. We spoke the same language but I did not always understand where they were coming from. For instance, the idea that a man should flee his home and not protect his family during a home invasion is utterly foreign. I have no idea what planet they got that from.

During my US travels, I found that both many of the blacks and whites in Baltimore were fantastically racist to the point I thought it was kooky. Same down in Miami and over in Los Angeles. Especially racist were many of the blacks who would treat me like an enemy, when I was thinking, "Man, if you get hit by a car, I will pull you out of the street. Why are you acting like this???"

Insofar as "black culture," again, there is no specific black culture that all subscribe to. Blacks are all over the map on cultures. Some blacks are fantastically racist, while others just take people for what they are. Gullah speakers in South Carolina have little in common with folks from inner-city Detroit and Jamaicans in Miami.

I see racism in every country I go, which is nearly 70 so far. America is downright tame by comparison with racism in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The United States has huge and vibrant media and communications base that can magnify and blast our every freckle out to the universe, largely in English.

English is an official language in about 80 countries and territories with hundreds of millions of speakers. This is important: when big news hits in Japanese language, few people will see it because there is no global focus on Japan, and their media is in Japanese, so only a trickle leaks out, while big news in America generally is a global event.

America is not black and white, and not all blacks hate whites. We got along pretty well in my hometown. There was racism, sure. We saw it plenty. Believe it or not it was usually instigated by blacks but not always. I am specifically referring to my generation in my town. In previous generations it is clear that racism was more instigated by whites.

More interestingly, millions of immigrants today were not around during the slavery and years of severe oppression. They had nothing to do with it. A Norwegian or Russian who immigrates today was not around during those times yet if he is involved in some tragedy involving a person deemed as black, most assuredly many people will lump him with the slave owners.

Chinese, Koreans, and Indians who immigrate to America will, when push comes to shove, be lumped in with whites, though they had zero involvement with historical grievances that are being pathologically dragged down the roads of America.

Many immigrants see the situation more clearly for what it is than do many native born Americans. These immigrants share no guilt or guilt complex. They are more likely to call it excuse-making.

Many of these immigrants came from backgrounds that make previous US oppression look like playground fights and yet they thrive and move on, which gets them lumped with whites, just as Chinese tend to succeed around the world which in part creates anti-Sino feelings with much violent precedent in many countries. Chinese often are called “The Jews of Asia” because they succeed, and as pejorative striking two with one stone.

George Zimmerman himself was born in Peru to a Peruvian mother, and reportedly is also of mixed African decent from his mother’s side. But this matters mostly only to severe racists.

This may sound confusing to non-Americans, which again is my target audience for this dispatch. Many Americans know most or all of this and more.

To add to the mix and to explain more why emotions have been running wild in the Zimmerman-Martin case, Zimmerman’s first problem after the shooting is his name. Zimmerman is a common Jewish name, and so not only was he seen as white (sight unseen), but a Jew.

Anyone who has spent much time travelling around America knows that anti-Semitism lives, especially among black cultures.

We know that anti-Semitism is entrenched deeply among many peoples globally. Among American blacks anti-Semitism must be among the highest.

To be sure, I saw plenty of anti-Semitism in Europe, and in the UK, and of course in the Middle East. I personally know American whites who are anti-Semitic.

Yet the severest anti-Semitism I have seen in Europe or North America came from American blacks, some of who seem as anti-Semitic as Iraqi Arabs.

It is no coincidence that our special relationship with Israel began to tank the day Obama stepped into the Oval office. Israel is loaded with Zimmermans and if Obama were viewed as cozy with Jews or Israel that would undermine his base.

George Zimmerman had a packaging problem. Some people would side for or against him because he is half-white, and millions of others would side against him because he is “Jewish.” In fact, he is Catholic, yet there is no doubt he would lose net support with a Jewish name.

This means many whites in America and abroad who may have otherwise sided with Zimmerman based on the facts, likely would jump ship because they wrongly saw him as Jewish, and so would not check the facts so that they could go with a narrative that leads to their desired endstate.

There is yet another complicating factor: Guns.

Most people realize that guns are as charged a topic in America as is racism. This topic brings out severe emotions. To say to many Europeans or Americans that you own guns is tantamount to saying you are a Satanist.

“Castle” and “stand your ground” laws that allow homeowners and others to defend themselves are seen as barbaric. “How dare you shoot someone just because three young men approached you and your wife and daughters on a dark night and said give me your money and keys! (And wife and daughters.)”

Vice President Joe Biden himself, on national television, said that he gave his wife Jill the advice that if someone breaks into their home, go out to the balcony with the double barreled shotgun and fire two shots into the air. Any combat troop or law officer will say that is about the worst advice imaginable. The list of reasons why this is terrible advice would be longer than this dispatch.

Millions of Americans want all guns swept off the streets. Anyone who uses one, even in self-defense, will be taken as a savage and used as a sacrificial lamb when possible. Obama wants the guns. Zimmerman the white Jew (really half Latino and Catholic) used a gun to defend himself. He was a perfect political tool for Obama.

This was a recipe for madness, especially so among Americans who will often loquaciously comment or articles and then admit they did not bother to read the contents.

There was a joke in Afghanistan – factually based – that if you say something three times to Afghans it becomes “true.” The first person who says something three times is right. The new truth becomes entrenched. “These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for.”

From a propaganda perspective, whoever got there first owned the message.

Millions of Americans are similar, and millions of Americans are not sufficiently literate to read this dispatch. If you are a foreigner whose first language is not English, and you understand this dispatch, your reading comprehension is no doubt as high or higher than most Americans.

If Zimmerman’s name was Gonzales, a typical Latino name, there is a high probability few of us would have heard of the case.

One of the best ways to ameliorate this severe racism is to stop accepting the race card without proof. When racism happens, we must call it out no matter who displays it, including the President.

We must stop accepting the race card as a coupon that can be exchanged for gold, and start remembering that two lynchings do not make a right.

Agreed that Walter's article does not apply to the facts of the Z. case, but is there any merit in its central point?

===========================

The Decline of the Civil-Rights EstablishmentBlack leaders weren't so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.By SHELBY STEELE

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."

(Martin Luther King Jr. sits in a jail cell at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama in October 1967)

Today's black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and '60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.Related Video

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one's cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.

And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2007).

==========================================Contrast this:

From Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963:

I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Shapiro, the president of indie cable broadcaster IFC, should pose the same question to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and every member of the black protest establishment: Why don’t you protest more black crime victims? The answer would be the same in all cases: Because the only black victims who interest the race industry and its mainstream media handmaidens are blacks who have been killed by “white” civilians, including honorary whites like Martin’s killer George Zimmerman, or blacks who have been killed or offended by the police (black officers will do here in a pinch).

Unfortunately, there are very few such victims. Ninety-three percent of all black homicide casualties from 1980 to 2008 were killed by other blacks, and are thus of no interest whatsoever to today’s race advocates, because they fail to support the crucial story line that blacks remain under siege by a racist white power structure.

The coverage of New York City’s West Indian Day Parade in September 2011 exemplifies this rule. The New York Times and other local outlets spilled an enormous amount of ink on an altercation between a black city councilman, Jumaane Williams, and the New York Police Department. Williams had tried to cross a police line, and, when he was not allowed to pass, got into a scuffle with some officers. He was then handcuffed and held until the police verified his identity. The city’s Public Advocate, a New York State Assemblyman, and Williams charged the police with racism, claiming that the treatment of Williams exemplified the “siege mentality” with which the police treat black men in New York City. To this day, the Williams detention is regularly mentioned by the New York Times in its constant coverage of the alleged racism of the NYPD.

What else happened on that parade day in 2011? A black-on-black bloodbath:

In the pre-dawn celebrations known as J’ouvert that open the parade, one man was fatally shot, crowds were sprayed with gunfire, and several people were stabbed. A shooting at a McDonald’s at 6 am triggered a stampede. The police repeatedly had to break up mobs that formed after gunfire. . . .

Later that day, a shootout near the parade route killed its intended victim as well as a 55-year-old mother who had been standing nearby; the two police officers who responded to the murders were also shot. Police also arrested someone in the vicinity of the parade who shot off several rounds without hitting anyone. The day’s violence would have likely been even worse had officers not removed 15 guns from spectators; each of those potentially life-saving stops would undoubtedly be condemned as racial profiling by the ACLU and its backers in the City Council and in Albany.

Previous West Indian Day Parades were hardly more pacific; the violence includes a man shot in the leg in 2007; another leg shooting and a stabbing in 2006; a man shot to death in 2005; and in 2003, a stabbing in the neck and someone who, from his perch on a parade float, shot into a group of spectators and killed one of them.

None of this violence was given the intense and loving press treatment accorded to the detention of Jumaane Williams. In fact, it was barely mentioned at all, even though, arguably, it is more serious to be shot dead than to be briefly detained by the police. Nothing prevented Al Sharpton from protesting the killings and stabbings that day. However, only Councilman Williams falls into the favored category of, in this case, black victim offended by the police, and so his detention was the only event that day worth noting.

On Halloween 2010, five-year-old Aaron Shannon Jr. was playing in his family’s backyard in his Spiderman costume in South Central Los Angeles. Two gangbangers from the Kitchen Crips, seeking to avenge a previous gang shooting, shot randomly towards some houses and killed Shannon, also wounding the boy’s grandfather and uncle. Sharpton, Inc., was perfectly free to make the names of Shannon’s killers, Leonard Hall Jr., 21, and Marcus Denson, 18, as infamous as that of George Zimmerman. But the race baiters never showed up. The killing aroused not the slightest interest from them because it was useless in aiding the white racism conceit. And so no one outside Shannon’s immediate circle remembers today who Hall and Denson are, even though Shannon was at least as innocent as Trayvon Martin (whose image as combined Eagle Scout-St. Francis of Assisi has in any case come under some stress of late, information, that, if true, is not irrelevant to assessing Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.)

We know the names of virtually every unarmed black civilian shot by the New York Police Department in recent years — Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell — as well we should. To the extent that botched police tactics or training contributed to these tragic killings, the incidents are rightly publicized so that they can be prevented from reoccurring. Here’s the difference between these killings — they are a tiny handful — and the routine black-on-black killings that occur by the dozen every day across the country. The officers who mistakenly shot their victims thinking they were facing a deadly threat set out that morning to protect people, often in minority neighborhoods, not to injure anyone. A significant number of black-on-black shootings, however, like many shootings among all races, are done in cold blood.

Here’s another difference between police killings of blacks, white-on-black killings, and black-on-black killings: Sheer numbers. There were nine civilian victims of police gunfire last year in New York City; there were several hundred black homicide victims in the city, almost all shot by other blacks or Hispanics, none of them given substantial press coverage. Nationwide, in 2005, there were 2,646 black victims of other blacks, compared to 349 black victims of whites or Hispanics. The relative rates of interracial killings are wildly skewed towards black on white killings: There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of civilian black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of civilian white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. Yet to read columnists such as the Times’s Charles Blow or to listen to the professional racial extortionists, it is the police and whites who are the biggest threat to blacks, not other blacks.

A further prudential reason why the routine black gangbanger victim gets so little coverage: He is not particularly appealing. Though he had the misfortune of being the victim that day, he could just as easily have been the perpetrator the next day. That is true of many white-on-white homicides as well.

Shapiro, of course, has another explanation for the absence of coverage of most black crime victims: The media is too white, especially in its upper ranks. The “stunning under-representation of minorities at the TOP of our national and local news organizations creates an institutional lack of empathy for minority victims of violent crime,” he writes. Has he noticed that Trayvon Martin is not exactly being ignored? As soon as the media got wind of the story, it ran with it. When Amadou Diallo was shot by four NYPD officers in 1999, the New York Times ran three and a half articles a day on the incident for several months.

If Sharpton protested outside the jail cell of the routine robber or gunman in East New York with as much zeal as he devotes to allegedly racist whites or to the police, if he ever stigmatized black killers of blacks, the phony problem of “racial profiling” might go away, since it is merely an epiphenomenon of black crime. Protesting or covering black crime, however, would require bringing out some uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that the homicide rate among black males of the ages of 14 to 24 is nearly ten times that of white and Hispanic young males combined. Evan Shapiro mentions the elevated rates of black homicide victimization but somehow neglects to include the black homicide commission rate. His column flawlessly exemplifies the ignorance of the Hollywood elites regarding today’s racial realities.

"The family rescued by George Zimmerman after a rollover crash in Florida are terrified they will become targets for hate mobs."

"Mark and Dana Michelle Gerstle told friends they do not want to talk publicly about Zimmerman for fear they will be accused of portraying him as a hero — and face a backlash from those who consider he got away with murder. 'They are very grateful to Zimmerman for what he did, but they do not want to get involved,' said a friend, who asked not to be named."

This is a great origin story for a superhero. This is why he needs a costume... with a mask... if he wants to roam around finding people who need help and rushing to the rescue.

Who was that masked man? people will ask.

The answer will be: He was that man that all the important people called a racist, and they wanted to see him put away for a long, long time, but the jury — following the judge's instructions to adhere to truth, justice, and the American way — acquitted. He left the courthouse a free man, and determined to continue in the guardian role that led to branding him as a racist and knowing that anyone he ever helped would simultaneously be hurt by the linkage to the man known as racist, he put on that mask.

During a 2012 interview on the streets of Jacksonville, Fl., one of the leaders of the New Black Panthers, Mikhail Muhammad, told a group of reporters that Trayvon Martin has “been assassinated by a wicked white beast.”

Muhammad went on to call Zimmerman a “no good Jew.”

The press conference was held to call attention to the $10,000 bounty the New Black Panthers have placed on the head of George Zimmerman, who is now awaiting the jury’s ruling.

Muhammad explained that the Panthers were “mobilizing 10,000 men, black men in the ‘tri-states’ of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.”

Zimmerman is actually Catholic. Both the father and the son. But it’s telling that Muhammad’s mind quickly goes to the Jewish question. The NBPP is not just racist, it’s reflexively anti-Semitic. And while it’s easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, the very fact that Holder’s people intervened to protect it against voter intimidation charges show how high in Obama Inc. its support goes.

Shocking Photos: Barack Obama Appeared and Marched with New Black Panthers in 2007

byBryan Preston

October 3, 2011 - 7:01 am

Breitbart has the story and the photos, which raise questions about a number of things including why the Department of Justice closed its investigation of the New Black Panthers in 2009 — after it had already won that case. PJ Media led the coverage of the DOJ’s dismissal of this case, when J. Christian Adams resigned from the Department over the dismissal and told the story here. Was closure of that case a quid pro quo for the Panthers’ public support of Obama in 2007 and 2008?

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.

—

Among those appearing with Obama was Shabazz, the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s and then mocking their widows in this video (7:20 – 8:29).

Injustice [J. Christian Adams' book, which will be released Tuesday] includes a disturbing photo of Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

There are even more photographs.

I have learned that Regnery initially received approval from a person who took pictures of the events in Selma to publish these additional photographs in Injustice.

After the photographer wrote Regnery reversing his permission to include the photographs in Injustice, the images were removed from the photographer’s Flickr account. Yet we were able to capture them before they disappeared.

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

The New Black Panthers are a radical Muslim black separatist group that, among other things, supported threats of violence against cartoonists in Denmark for their depictions of Muhammad. Members of the group engaged in overt voter intimidation in 2008 in Philadelphia, and the Obama-Holder Department of Justice later dropped the case against them after it had won that case. The Panthers endorsed Obama in 2008, an endorsement that was posted on and later scrubbed from his campaign web site.

I’d say that this is far more relevant than an anonymously painted rock out in West Texas. This is the current president choosing of his own free will to accept support from and appear with some very radical and racist figures, during his rise to power. The New Black Panthers’ militant radicalism and racism are impossible to ignore. A “Malik Shabazz” (not exactly a common name) has appeared numerous times on White House visitor logs since Obama’s inauguration; the White House has insisted that it’s not the same Malik Shabazz who leads the New Black Panther movement but has not produced the alternative Malik Shabazz. Added to the fact that Barack Obama sat in the pews of radical racist pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, borrowing the title for one of his books from him and citing Wright as a mentor, we get a picture of a man who at the very least allied himself with very radical elements when it suited him. And that man is the president of the United States.

And we have a picture of a mainstream media, obsessed with race when it suits them, not asking Obama a single question about this event in Selma or his other links and associations with radicals from the beginning of his political career, to the present.

J. Christian Adams’ book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, is due out Tuesday, October 4. PJ will publish an excerpt of Injustice tomorrow as well.

Update: This is one of several photos in the book that President Obama must address. It’s close to impossible to overstate how noxious a character Shabazz is. Among other things, he led the NBPP’s protests at the Danish embassy in Washington DC during the Muhammad cartoon controversy, siding with the extremists who falsified some of the cartoons and turned those cartoons into a cause for violent riots. Obama’s appearance with Shabazz shows either a total lack of judgement, or reveals something about Obama’s character and beliefs that the nation has a right to know about and assess.

New Black Panther: Never Contacted by Obama DOJ over Zimmerman Threats

by Lee Stranahan11 Jul 2013

The Obama Department of Justice made no attempt to stop blatant threats against George Zimmerman, according to one of the people who helped make those threats.

Despite issuing a widely publicized threat against Zimmerman last year, the New Black Panther Party was never contacted by the Department of Justice according to a statement from a NBPP spokesman.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Brother James J. Muhammad, the National Director of Education for The Ordinary People Society New Black Panther Party. He said, "We were never contacted by the Justice Department. We were never contacted to calm down."

Brother Muhammad was one of the people directly calling for the "capture" of George Zimmerman last year. As Breitbart News reported on March 24, 2012:

Several dozen supporters of the group known by its acronym NBPP -- unrelated to the revolutionary Black Panther Party active in the 1960s-1980s -- meanwhile protested for the third time this week at the police headquarters in Sanford, Florida.

Activists had called for the mobilization of 5,000 black men to capture Zimmerman. And Muhammad said the NBPP was receiving donations from black entertainers and athletes, with a goal to collect $1 million by next week.

Yesterday, Judicial Watch confirmed what Breitbart News had originally reported seventeen months ago. A small group within the Justice Department known as the Community Relations Service (CRS) was in Sanford in March and April of 2012, facilitating racially charged marches, rallies, and protests against George Zimmerman.

The statement by the New Black Panther Party that the DOJ never contacted them is a critical point because some defenders of the Obama Department of Justice's involvement in the Trayvon Martin story have tried to claim that CRS was merely keeping the peace. This is their mission statement:

The Community Relations Service is the Department's "peacemaker" for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, and national origin.

Despite that stated mission, the CRS and the Justice Department apparently did nothing at all to even address the most obvious conflict arising from racial issues -- the widely publicized, racially charged threat against George Zimmerman. One would think that the "peacemaker" for reducing conflicts and tensions would put the people who issued a Wanted Poster high on their priority list.

When asked to confirm, Brother James Muhammad told Breitbart News, "We were not contacted by the Justice Department and have never been asked by the Justice Department to cool it, calm down, or not move forward."

In this video, spokesman Makhail Muhammad said of Zimmerman in March 2012:

George Zimmerman was not a police officer. He was a community volunteer. But he had a passion to harass black males in that community. So, now today his father wants to talk about death threats. At least his son is still alive to talk about death threats. But what about Trayvon? He's not alive to talk about death threats. And I got to say this, Goddamnit, he should be fearful for his life. You can't keep killing black children, killing our children all over America. And we're supposed to take it easy? Supposed to play nice about it?

Newly Released Documents Detail the Department of Justice’s Role in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests

DOJ deployed obscure section to play role in Florida protests. Also read: Justice for Trayvon, Race-Hustler Style, by J. Christian Adams

byBryan Preston

July 10, 2013 - 9:29 am

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained documents proving that the Department of Justice played a major behind-the-scenes role in organizing protests against George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ on April 24, 2012. According to the documents JW received, a little-known DOJ unit called the Community Relations Service deployed to Sanford, FL, to organize and manage rallies against Zimmerman.

Among JW’s findings: •March 25 – 27, 2012, CRS spent $674.14 upon being “deployed to Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.” •March 25 – 28, 2012, CRS spent $1,142.84 “in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.” •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL “to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.” •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.” •April 3 – 12, 2012, CRS spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.” •April 11-12, 2012, CRS spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17 year old African American male.” – expenses for employees to travel, eat, sleep?

JW says the documents it obtained reveal that CRS is not engaging in its stated mission of conducting “impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution,” but instead engaged on the side of the anti-Zimmerman protesters.

On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying “They were there for us,” after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents.

Separately, in response to a Florida Sunshine Law request to the City of Sanford, Judicial Watch also obtained an audio recording of a “community meeting” held at Second Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford on April 19, 2012. The meeting, which led to the ouster of Sanford’s Police Chief Bill Lee, was scheduled after a group of college students calling themselves the “Dream Defenders” barricaded the entrance to the police department demanding Lee be fired. According to the Orlando Sentinel, DOJ employees with the CRS had arranged a 40-mile police escort for the students from Daytona Beach to Sanford.

“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”

Organizing such protests falls well within both President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s wheelhouses. Obama was a “community organizer” in his career prior to elective politics, a position that uses protests and street theater, along with threats, to obtain concessions from businesses and other political opponents. Holder has accused America of being a “nation of cowards” for not discussing racial issues enough. He also described black Americans as “my people” during a congressional hearing.

As the Zimmerman trial winds down, the threat of race riots should he be acquitted has risen.

Was anyone fooled by that? I hope not, but Renee Vaughan — an Austin activist — is getting reamed for her evil prank. Instapundit says:

Her name is Renee Vaughan. Her employer, the Texas Campaign For The Environment, has also apologized. Nonetheless, I hope the picture of her standing with a sign reading "We’re Racist And Proud" winds up being tagged to both.... It's a harsh consequence to become — for all time, on the web — Renee "Racist and Proud" Vaughan. She's apologized — sorry she got busted. You know how apologies are. But I doubt that she'd be sorry if her trick had worked and amplified the legend of the racism of Zimmerman and his defenders.

It's entirely fitting that her name should be forever linked to the motto "Racist and Proud," because that isn't a lie. It's true. It is racist to press the racism template onto the Zimmerman story, and it is done with full intent to stimulate feelings of race-based anxiety in vulnerable minds. That is heartless and evil.

I first heard of Trayvon Martin via a posted comment on an article I had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education in early March 2012. In retrospect that seems significant. The comment from some anonymous academic came a few days after the shooting and a month before President Obama observed in a Rose Garden talk, “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” In fact, academics from the start helped to drive the polarizing racial narrative that became inseparable from the Trayvon Martin case. And in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict, academics have continued the effort to poison public opinion.

Margaret Burnham, a professor of law at Northeastern University, for example, called the verdict “unreliable and unfair,” cited Zimmerman for “racial profiling,” faulted the local police investigation, criticized the “stand your ground law” (although it played no role in the trial), and compared the case to the Emmett Till lynching and other gross miscarriages of justice from the 1930s and 1940s. Burnham explains:

Race explains the results, which is not to say any single actor bore animus toward Trayvon Martin, but to recognize that had he not been a black male he would likely be alive today. That makes the Zimmerman case painfully and eerily familiar to those of us who study civil rights legal history.

Burnham provides what amounts to the finished draft of the fable that my Chronicle commenter had only begun to assemble. The comment itself has disappeared into the ether, but as best I can recall it, the writer was attempting to score the point that America is a profoundly racist society. He wrote in high academic dudgeon to the effect of, ‘Don’t speak to me of American values. A society in which this takes place is rotten to the core.’

The narrative that quickly took shape was that of a white guy stalking and then shooting down a black teenager in cold-blood, and the police haplessly doing nothing. Their failure to arrest the perpetrator, George Zimmerman, on the spot, was the ingredient that turned an ordinary homicide into an indictment of America. Racial injustice was once again unfolding according to a well-known script.

The Script

That view of what happened, of course, still has many partisans, not least President Obama, as well as a wide swath of the nation’s media. But let’s keep the professoriate’s role in focus. The academy has been profoundly complicit with the promotion of a mistaken and socially destructive framing of Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal. The sheer number of statements by academics is far too large to permit anything like a comprehensive summary, but we can look at some representative examples:

Claire Potter, professor of history at the New School for Public Engagement, wrote on the Chronicle’s “Tenured Radical” blog, “At Tenured Radical we, like so many others, are appalled and heartbroken at last night’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in [the] murder of Trayvon Martin. Between Shelby v. Holder and this travesty, it feels like we are spinning back in time.” She provided links to help readers “to find a rally or Trayvon Martin protest near you.”

Michele Goodwin, professor of law at the University of Minnesota, writing on another Chronicle blog, “Brainstorm,” gave a version of the false but widely repeated narrative back in March 2012: “a white male” who “stalked the youth” and “gunned him down.” She also attributes to Zimmerman (falsely) a racial epithet he supposedly made in speaking to the 911 dispatcher, and makes the “screams for help”--which witnesses say were Zimmerman’s--into “Martin’s last words.”

Rutledge M. Dennis, professor of sociology at George Mason University, is offering a course “Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics,” which looks at the Martin case in the context of “how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia...”

Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, likewise depicts Martin as a racial victim: “the defense consistently employed racial stereotypes and played on racial knowledge to turn the victim into the predator and the predator into the victim.” He proceeds into a roll call of victims of racial injustice:

The verdict did not surprise me, or most people I know, because we’ve been here before. We were here with Latasha Harlins and Rodney King, with Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart. We were here with Anthony Baez, Michael Wayne Clark, Julio Nunez, Maria Rivas, Mohammed Assassa.

The list continues with dozens more.

But let’s pause with the examples and consider the script itself. The trope, of course, is that black suspects are mercilessly hounded, even if they are innocent; and white suspects stroll free, even if they are self-evidently guilty. It is plainly true that both things have happened in our recorded history. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they still happen, though we are long past the point where they are common or that they go unremarked or that they are allowed to stand if exposed to the light of day. Still the collective memory of this sort of racial injustice is so powerful that it can blind us to the facts at hand.

The Trayvon Martin shooting just isn’t a very good fit with the racial injustice narrative. Martin was not a poor put-upon innocent; Zimmerman was a man of mixed race, living in an integrated neighborhood, and possessed of a life history that contained only friendly relations with blacks. And both the police and the jury believed he acted in genuine self-defense. The narrative of the white neighborhood watch guy gunning down in cold blood the innocent child who went out to buy Skittles didn’t stand up to facts.

Academics in our post-modern age, however, are rarely daunted by facts. When the facts get in the way of a good narrative, the narrative tends to win. What’s going on?

From Zanzinger to Zimmerman

One way to think of this willingness to let a narrative trump the facts is that it is a victory of poetry over reason. A story retold often enough in an emotionally compelling way becomes “true” even if it isn’t. That heartfelt truth can indeed flatten almost any obstacle, especially if it is rooted in real events. When it comes to instances of blacks unfairly accused and whites getting away with murder, we have both a tragic national history and a poetic consciousness of what happened.

Bob Dylan, for example, has supplied sound tracks for both scenarios. In “Hurricane,” Dylan sings of a professional boxer, Rubin Carter, who is black and who was railroaded in 1967 for a murder he didn’t commit. And in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a masterpiece of storytelling, Dylan related how “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,” but no one much cared that the rich white guy had beat the black barmaid to death with a cane in February 1963.

There were plenty of witnesses to Zanzinger’s deed at the white-tie Baltimore Spinsters’ ball. It wasn’t a whodunit. But Zanzinger ended up with only a six-month term in prison for manslaughter. He went on to an appalling life. When he died in 2009, the New York Times obituary recounted Zanzinger’s conviction years later for fraudulently collecting rent from black families “living in shanties he no longer owned,” shanties that “lacked running water, toilets or outhouses.” He paid a $62,000 fine and had to spend two nights in jail for an 18-month suspended sentence. That was in 1991.

One other detail that bears recalling: Zanzinger harbored bitterness toward Dylan for immortalizing his crime in a song. The Times reported Zanzinger telling a biographer of Dylan, “I should have sued him and put him in jail,” presumably for the songwriter’s altering a few details that intensified Zanzinger’s villainy.

So is Zimmerman the new Zanzinger? Zimmerman is reportedly suing NBC for doctoring a tape of his 911 call to make it sound like he was racially profiling Martin. A doctored tape isn’t quite the same as a ballad that seared itself into the memory of a generation. But NBC’s depiction of Zimmerman clearly helped advance the racial narrative of what happened on February 26, 2012.

I am, incidentally, far from alone in noticing the historical resemblance. As far back as April 2012, bloggers were drawing the comparison.

Path Dependency

If you arrange the keys on a typewriter one way, they remain that way for generations and for new technologies, such as keyboards, no matter the inconvenience. If you set the width of the railroad tracks at a specific gauge, it too will remain that way seemingly forever. Economists call this “path dependency.” Initial decisions, sometimes intended just as improvised answers to a situation, tend to stay with us.

That can happen with misinformation too. In the early hours of a story, reporters often get things wrong. NPR did a telling round-up of the misinformation reported as news in the early hours following the Newtown shootings. Some of those misstatements are still in circulation.

One of the misstatements in the Trayvon Martin case wasn’t actually a statement at all. It was the picture of the 17-year-old Martin as a twelve-year-old, which was widely circulated and heightened the sense that Zimmerman had murdered an innocent child. But the most consequential mistake was the report that Zimmerman was “white.” This became amended over time to “white Hispanic,” but the truth was more complicated. Zimmerman is of mixed race, and was raised in a household that included two African-American girls. This had no bearing on the question of whether he had committed a crime in connection with Martin’s death but it has a great deal of bearing on the aptness of the narrative presented by Burnham, Potter, Goodwin, Dennis, Kelley and so many others. In that narrative Zimmerman was “white,” or as Goodwin puts it, a person who “identifies as white,” and that identification was crucial to turning the story into an allegory of racial injustice in modern America.

Anger

The Trayvon Martin story has one other crucial element: it is a story meant to inflame. Indignation is a worthy response to real injustice, but indignation can also be a force in its own right. Anger feels empowering, and it can become a kind of mob rule of the emotions over our better judgment. Several years ago I wrote a book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, about our cultural shift from the slow burn to the fast fuse. We Americans over the last half century gradually relinquished our sense that real strength lies in self-control and that anger has to be governed. Instead we became convinced that repressing anger is psychologically damaging and letting it out is empowering. Vituperative anger became not only destigmatized but admired and celebrated.

In a sense, we now wait around for opportunities to get angry and we have supplied ourselves with an arsenal of occasions in which we are licensed to let loose. Righteous indignation over racial injustice is near the top of the list.

This applies in nearly all contexts of American life, but higher education holds a special place in that arsenal. Our colleges and universities are the nation’s primary font for racial ressentiment. The American college campus is the place where we accentuate racial division as a matter of policy via preferences in admissions, organization of students into grievance-based groups, and curricula that foreground the narrative of racial oppression as the central story of American history. In this environment, the need to stoke grievance is never-ending, and the opportunity to turn tragic events into fodder for protest is almost irresistible.

While many have complained that President Obama, the New York Times, and the mainstream media overall have fed the outrage over Zimmerman, the racializing of the Martin killing has deeper roots in academe. After all, President Obama’s own career was in substantial part formed in the context of university-based racial grievance. We had a good reminder of that in March 2012, when some videos of Obama as a Harvard Law student in 1991 came to light, showing him speaking at a rally in support of Derrick Bell, the bombastic law school professor who invented “critical race theory.” And our media are saturated with graduates of college programs who have been thoroughly schooled in the America-is-racist doctrine. The Daily News ran as a cover story a picture of a black hoodie, with a list of black men murdered before Trayvon Martin culminating in the question, “When will it end?” It is the right question, but not as the Daily News intended it.

So the anger-is-empowering theme and the readiness to grab hold of an event and fit it to the anger narrative is in great part a university invention, supported by a substantial portion of the professoriate who have little to offer other than their commitment to keeping the pot on boil.

The Greater Outrage

But let’s not leave it there. I am thankful for the discernment of the jurors in Florida who heard the case. They saw that the story presented by the prosecution was a very poor match for the evidence. The events of that night in February 2012 remain murky in many details. We ought to grieve that a young man was killed, but that grief shouldn’t be out of proportion with the broader problem. As Will Allen mentioned in the National Review, there were 61 murders in Chicago alone during the Zimmerman trial, 52 of the victims were black, and 43 of them black males. Most died of gunshot wounds. Their lives were no less precious than Martin’s. But their deaths occasioned none of the attention and none of the outrage. The problem is basically that these murders do not fit the narrative of racial injustice. The Bureau of Justice’s special report in 2007 estimated that 93 percent of the murders of black men were committed by other black men.

The carnage is real and our justice system seems poorly equipped to do anything about it. This is something that scholars and teachers should address. Holding rallies to protest the Zimmerman verdict and competing to see who can express the greatest outrage does nothing to cut the rate at which black men die of bullet wounds. Rather the academic eagerness to advance the racist-white-on-innocent-black narrative of the Martin shooting simply exacerbates the nation’s racial divisions. We can do better.

This article originally appeared on Minding the Campus on July 23, 2013.

Liberal media love new Jesus book 'Zealot', fail to mention author is Muslim

By John S. DickersonPublished July 24, 2013FoxNews.com

Zealot

Reza Aslan, author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” has been interviewed on a host of media outlets in the last week. Riding a publicity wave, the book has surged to #2 on Amazon's list.

Media reports have introduced Aslan as a “religion scholar” but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim.

His book is not a historian’s report on Jesus. It is an educated Muslim’s opinion about Jesus -- yet the book is being peddled as objective history on national TV and radio.

“Zealot” is a fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs that Christianity has taught about Jesus for 2,000 years.

Aslan is not a trained historian. Like tens of thousands of us he has been formally educated in theology and New Testament Greek.

He is a bright man with every right to hold his own opinion about Jesus—and to proselytize his opinion.

As a sincere man, Aslan’s Muslim beliefs affect his entire life, including his conclusions about Jesus. But this is not being disclosed. “Zealot” is being presented as objective and scholarly history, not as it actually is—an educated Muslim’s opinions about Jesus and the ancient Near East.

“Zealot” is a fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs that Christianity has taught about Jesus for 2,000 years. Its conclusions are long-held Islamic claims—namely, that Jesus was a zealous prophet type who didn’t claim to be God, that Christians have misunderstood him, and that the Christian Gospels are not the actual words or life of Jesus but “myth.”

These claims are not new or unique. They are hundreds of years old among Muslims. Sadly, readers who have listened to interviews on NPR, "The Daily Show," Huffington Post or MSNBC may pick up the book expecting an unbiased and historic report on Jesus and first century Jewish culture. (I will let my Jewish friends address Aslan’s statement on MSNBC that, “there were certainly a lot of Jewish terrorists in first century Palestine.”)

As a journalist and author who is Christian I cannot imagine penning a so-called objective biography of Muhammad and then concealing my conflict of interest in national media interviews.

In world history there are no religions more violently and anciently opposed than the crusading, fighting, at times blood-shedding rivals of historic Islam and historic Christianity. Even non-violent Muslims and Christians, like Aslan and myself, understand that we hold aggressively oppositional views—particularly about Jesus. National news coverage of “Zealot” has ignored this conflict of interest.

“Zealot” is written with the self-assumed authority of groundbreaking revelation from a historian. In reality, it is a religious person’s opinion about Jesus—from an adherent to the religion that has been in violent opposition to Christ for 1,400 years.

Aslan informs us that we cannot trust the Gospel of Mark--because it was written 40 years after Jesus’ death. He then chides us to trust his new book, written almost 2,000 years later.

I believe in Aslan’s right to hold and propagate any opinion. It’s a right that, ironically, Christians do not have in many Muslim countries.

My concern is that national media coverage be smart and forthright about this conflict of interest, just as it would be if I—a Christian author and pastor—wrote a book about Muhammad.

Pouring praise onto “Zealot” as new information about Jesus, without explaining its author’s devotion to a combatting religion, is blatant bias. This same bias would be unthinkable if the Christian and Muslim roles were reversed.

With its riveting demolition of Jesus, “Zealot” will continue to attract interviews—some from reporters who want to see Jesus deconstructed. Many more interviews will come from reporters who simply don’t understand that Reza Aslan has a horse in this race. He is not an objective observer, but, to use his own word, a zealot, with religious motivation to destroy what Western culture has believed about its central figure for hundreds of years. In many ways, this conflict is larger than Christianity and Islam. It is a conflict of Western and Middle Eastern foundations. These are great and important debates that we should welcome, but let’s be honest about our motivations, positions and conflicts of interest as we dialogue.

Let’s hope reporters in future interviews will, being informed, mention the glaring conflict of interest in this Islamic opinion of Jesus. It is no more objective than my educated views about Muhammad, as a Christian.

“Zealot” is not new work from a historian. It is a sophisticated presentation of views that Muslims have held about Jesus for more than 1,000 years.

John S. Dickerson is author of the book “The Great Evangelical Recession: 6 Factors that Will Crash the American Church…and How to Prepare” and senior pastor of Cornerstone in Prescott, Arizona. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter @JohnSDickerson.